RIM Apologizes for Code Signing Server Outage

It took RIM 5 days but they finally got on top of the Code Signing server outages at the end of last week. Tyler Lessard, head of RIM’s developer relations team, also publically apologized for the outages and confirmed that RIM take issues like this seriously. Hopefully in the future they will take them seriously enough to offer developers an ongoing status of the situation instead of them having to scour the forums.

Alternatively I was really hoping to hear RIM finally just admit that code signing in its current form is simply a pain for developers and adds little to no value. I have been trying to drive that message home to RIM but they seem to just love themselves some code signing even with their next gen PlayBook OS.

Hello BlackBerry developer community, it’s Tyler Lessard here. I head up the Developer Relations team here at Research In Motion® (RIM®). As some of you are aware, we recently had some issues with the stability of our code signing servers. Earlier this week, BlackBerry® developers were not able to sign their applications during periods of downtime of the code signing service. The issues that we experienced have now been resolved and I’d like to apologize to the community for this situation. We realize this can be a disruption to your business and we take issues like this very seriously.

As soon as the issue was identified, it was escalated for root cause analysis and resolution. Through that investigation, we identified a diagnostic activity that was acting abnormally during the signing process. Upon resolving the issue with this diagnostic process, operations were restored to a level of service that we would expect.

The signing servers are now operating normally and developers can continue with code signing. We are continuing to monitor the service closely and are actively evaluating new solutions that we can implement to improve the reliability of the service overall. As always, thank you for your support and for bearing with us through this exercise.